England is divided into counties, and the subject is considerably more confusing than it ought to be, because there are several overlapping systems in use at once and people are attached to the oldest of them.
The historic counties
Thirty-nine in England, and most are very old. Many were established as Anglo-Saxon shires before the Norman Conquest, and the Domesday Book of 1086 is organised around counties that a modern reader would recognise.
The word shire is the older English term and survives in most of the names — Yorkshire, Lancashire, Derbyshire, Hampshire — while county came in with the Normans from French. A handful never took the suffix: Kent, Essex, Sussex, Surrey, Devon, Cornwall, Norfolk and Suffolk, several of which were Anglo-Saxon kingdoms in their own right. Norfolk and Suffolk are simply the north folk and south folk of the East Angles.
The 1974 reorganisation
The source of most of the confusion. The Local Government Act 1972, effective from 1974, redrew administrative boundaries wholesale and created new counties that nobody had asked for:
- Avon — around Bristol, abolished 1996 and still resented.
- Humberside — spanning both banks of the Humber, abolished 1996, and disliked on both sides.
- Cleveland — abolished 1996.
- Merseyside, Greater Manchester, West Midlands, Tyne and Wear — metropolitan counties, which survive.
Rutland, England’s smallest county, was abolished entirely and absorbed into Leicestershire. It campaigned continuously for twenty years and was restored in 1997, which tells you most of what you need to know about English county loyalty.
The systems now in use
Three, and they do not coincide:
- Historic counties — the traditional ones. No administrative function, but strong cultural identity and used in cricket, addresses and everyday speech.
- Ceremonial counties — 48 areas, each with a Lord Lieutenant representing the King. Close to the historic ones, with adjustments.
- Administrative areas — county councils, unitary authorities and metropolitan boroughs, which have been repeatedly reorganised and vary in name and scope.
The practical consequence is that a place can be in one county for cricket, another for its postal address, and a third for its bin collection.
Why people care
County identity in England is real, particularly in the older rural counties and in Yorkshire, which regards itself as a category apart. Cricket is organised by historic county and provides the main formal outlet for it. County shows, county flags — most of them recently designed — and county days have all grown in the last thirty years.
The abolition of a county name in 1974 was experienced by a great many people as the erasure of something, and the campaigns to restore Rutland, Herefordshire and the East Riding all succeeded eventually.